(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a packet switching system and method.
(b) Description of the Related Art
A packet switching system is a system for switching an input packet to an output port corresponding to a destination address of a packet input through an input port. Such a packet switching system includes a switch fabric for switching to the output port according to the destination of the packet. At this point, if there are two or more packets destined for one output port, competition takes place inside the switch fabric.
Particularly, because the output port of an input packet cannot be predicted in a space division switching network, it may occur that two or more packets in a time slot have one output port as a destination. At this time, because only one packet can be switched to the output port, a competition for the output port between the remaining packets occurs.
To mediate such packet competition, a method using a buffer is mainly used. That is, a switch fabric transmits competing packets to a buffer to buffer them, and then switches the packets being buffered to an output port when the output port is idle.
The packet switching system of this type is designed to have a single switch fabric and a single buffer. Thus, if the scale of the network grows, the hardware structure of the switch fabric becomes complicated, and the switch fabric size and the buffer size need to be increased. Accordingly, the number of buffer ports and the number of interfaces also need to be increased, and therefore the power consumption and cost of the system increases. This imposes a limitation on network expandability.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.